One thing is for certain: entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart, but is it for those who lack business dedication? Let’s find out!
Smarter Faster Better
by Charles Duhigg
⏱ 15 minutes reading time
🎧 Audio version available
Technically speaking, almost anyone can be an entrepreneur, but not everyone can do it well and build a successful brand. There’s a risk factor.
If you want to create a company or brand and grow it, and found yourself lacking the kind of dedication all those blogs and articles talk about, you’ve come to the right place.
Consider Your Perspective
In business, it’s not just a great product that plucks you out of obscurity and launches you into a lap of riches. There are a million other factors, but everyone can agree that the amount of dedication you put in will be reflected back on you. If nothing else, your team will give you back the same amount of energy you give them.
What will happen if you don’t have that determination and dedication? According to the Small Business Administration, 20% of small businesses experience failure in their first year.
50% of brands fail after five years. Only a few, around 33%, survive for over 10 years.
Everyone says you need determination, passion, and loyalty to succeed. But what can you do if you don’t actually know what you’re passionate about, which led to a lack of usiness dedication.
So, right now, instead of merely focusing on passion, how about focusing on meaning? How about focusing on working hard? There is no step by step rule book when it comes to what makes businesses wildly popular. Jeff Bezos started out by working on an online bookstore. Now, Amazon sells practically everything under the sun.
Learn to Cope With Failure
Failure is an inevitable bump in the road to success. It seems ridiculous to willingly sign up for something where failure is almost guaranteed, but no brand today would exist without someone taking a seemingly doomed risk.
In order to succeed, or better yet, become a more dedicated entrepreneur, accepting failure and learning to cope with it is essential.
You fail, and then accept that it is normal. Pick yourself up and go back, figure out what went wrong and move forward as a more experienced entrepreneur, capable of molding a better brand.
Allow Yourself Some Slack
At the end of the day, you want your brand to be something that complements you, not drowns you out. People forget that passion, by itself, isn’t always what it’s made out to be. Eventually, if not dealt with carefully, it can stifle your company’s growth.
To avoid this, give yourself some slack, a little space and autonomy so you can find yourself able to make objective business decisions that, at the end of the day, make your brand stand out more.
Why Business Dedication Is Important
Finally, we’ve arrived at a standstill. When all is said and done, no super successful brand exists without these two ingredients: dedication and hard work.
It’s simple. You have to be dedicated to what you’re building, the goals you’re striving to achieve, in order to make your brand matter– both to you and others.
Until you become dedicated to one interest and take things up a notch by making it a business model, the amount of success you’re aspiring to achieve can’t come true.
The alternative is spreading yourself too thin, chasing after too many different ideas and interests, then your business model is too unfocused to truly reach success. It’s true; in some areas, you may find a little success, but think to yourself. Is it enough? Do you want to succeed a little or do you want to build an entire successful brand?
So, what can you do? Keep an eye out for a little nudge towards the right direction.
The importance of effective business planning, and by extension, business dedication, is simpler than you realize. Sit down and map out a business to figure out what you’re most excited about and how you can make it happen.
Figure out a clear description for your brand, visualise you want it to look like, and your motivation behind creating it.
Following that, figure out where you can fit into the market. Are there any specific opportunities you see? Any competitors? Lastly, you’ll need to dive deeper into your capital needs. This includes budgeting and so many little details that can make or break a brand.
All these things, while seemingly small, will help in the long run. Business owners who don’t lay out a plan before they try to get their brand off the ground leave themselves vulnerable to challenges along the way.
Experts recommend figuring out a business model and infrastructure before your brand’s products or services are offered to the market. This is one of the keys to building a successful company that won’t end up in the 50% that closes their doors within the first years.
You can be dedicated to several things, but be aware that great success is more likely if you’re more focused. So, focus on dedicating yourself to putting out a fantastic product, focus on helping others, to providing services to your customers, and dedicating yourself to achieve the success you’ve worked so hard for.
People forget that dedication simply won’t work along– not unless it’s accompanied by hard work. So now, you have a winning combo: with hard work and dedication, you can achieve anything!
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